Viewing certain cultural domains (such as religion, politics, etc.) as vehicles for culturally constituted defense mechanisms, the objective of this research is a systematic comparison of the culturally constituted defenses employed in three different social groups for the handling of culturally forbidden aggressive, dependency, and sexual behavior. The groups to be studied are the Micronesian atoll of Ifaluk, an Israeli kibbutz, and a Burmese community. Based on data collected by means of interviews, psychological tests, and participant observation, we shall describe the family context within which aggressive, dependency, and sexual drives are socialized, their socialization processes, the cultural norms by which their expression is governed, the conflict engendered in social actors by the opposition between these drives and norms, and the culturally constituted defenses by which conflict is resolved. The aims are to discover (a) the extent to which the forms of these defenses vary with variations in family and socialization structures, and (b) the extent to which these forms, and the cultural domains from which they are constructed, are (1) variable within-drives/ within-groups, (2) within-drives/across-groups, (3) across-drives/within-groups, (4) across-drives/across-groups.